FancyCache and Windows 8
Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 10:38 am
Hello I have been testing this software for a long time. Overall I'm very pleased with this product. I have been running it on two different Windows 7 x64 computers. On one of my computers I have installed 24GB of RAM just to be able to have a huge fancycache cache. Unfortunately it has corrupted my SSD drive (to the point where I've had to reformat it completely) several times when I had deferred writes turned on, but it has only happened so far because my machine has been unstable because of overclocking (after crashing the computer refuses to boot because of corruption on the drive).
I've since then reset everything back to stock settings and enabled a daily backup of my SSD drive so if it gets corrupted again it's really easy to restore. Now my PC is super stable again.
Anyways, I have been playing around a bit with the Windows 8 Developer preview. Both in VMs and right now I'm writing from Windows 8 properly installed as dual-boot with Windows 7. I decided to try out how FancyCache works with it and I discovered a huge annoyance.
I installed Windows 8 on a separate small 25GB partition on an old HDD (because my SSD is basically out of space). Then I downloaded FancyCache for Volumes and gave the C: drive inside Windows 8 12GBs of cache. Normally starting the cache on Windows 7 takes about a second, but on Windows 8 FancyCache locks up for several minutes.
Opening the task manager explains why. Instead of FancyCache allocating all it's memory at once like in Windows 7, it now takes a looong time. I saw the memory usage climbing very, very slowly and waited for a couple of minutes until it finally stopped climbing. After that FancyCache started responding again and it seems to be working normally. Performance is remarkably improved. Probably because the C: drive for windows 8 is only using 12,2GB on an old slow HDD and my cache size is 12 GB xD.
Even more annoying though is what I discovered when I rebooted. It suddenly took several minutes as well, just to start the boot loader. Windows 8 has a new very cool bootloader and it seems to be loading the fancycache driver or something even before the bootloader. I didn't want it to take this long to boot my computer when I want to use Windows 7 and when I changed the default OS to Windows 7 with msconfig the Windows 7 bootloader came back and the very long boot time was fixed.
Now it only takes a really long time to boot Windows 8 because of the slow memory allocation.
I have no clue what has changed in Windows 8 that causes this, but currently this software doesn't work very well on Windows 8. Although if you just use a small cache like < 1GB this might not be that big of an issue.
If it won't be possible to allocate that much memory instantly in Windows 8 anymore like you can in Windows 7 it would be much better if FancyCache could start the memory allocation once Windows 8 has booted completely.
I've since then reset everything back to stock settings and enabled a daily backup of my SSD drive so if it gets corrupted again it's really easy to restore. Now my PC is super stable again.
Anyways, I have been playing around a bit with the Windows 8 Developer preview. Both in VMs and right now I'm writing from Windows 8 properly installed as dual-boot with Windows 7. I decided to try out how FancyCache works with it and I discovered a huge annoyance.
I installed Windows 8 on a separate small 25GB partition on an old HDD (because my SSD is basically out of space). Then I downloaded FancyCache for Volumes and gave the C: drive inside Windows 8 12GBs of cache. Normally starting the cache on Windows 7 takes about a second, but on Windows 8 FancyCache locks up for several minutes.
Opening the task manager explains why. Instead of FancyCache allocating all it's memory at once like in Windows 7, it now takes a looong time. I saw the memory usage climbing very, very slowly and waited for a couple of minutes until it finally stopped climbing. After that FancyCache started responding again and it seems to be working normally. Performance is remarkably improved. Probably because the C: drive for windows 8 is only using 12,2GB on an old slow HDD and my cache size is 12 GB xD.
Even more annoying though is what I discovered when I rebooted. It suddenly took several minutes as well, just to start the boot loader. Windows 8 has a new very cool bootloader and it seems to be loading the fancycache driver or something even before the bootloader. I didn't want it to take this long to boot my computer when I want to use Windows 7 and when I changed the default OS to Windows 7 with msconfig the Windows 7 bootloader came back and the very long boot time was fixed.
Now it only takes a really long time to boot Windows 8 because of the slow memory allocation.
I have no clue what has changed in Windows 8 that causes this, but currently this software doesn't work very well on Windows 8. Although if you just use a small cache like < 1GB this might not be that big of an issue.
If it won't be possible to allocate that much memory instantly in Windows 8 anymore like you can in Windows 7 it would be much better if FancyCache could start the memory allocation once Windows 8 has booted completely.